Betty Rollin, a network news correspondent "who described intensely personal life passages in two memoirs--First, You Cry, about being diagnosed with breast cancer and having a mastectomy, and Last Wish, in which she revealed that she had helped her pain-ravaged mother end her life," died November 7, the New York Times reported. She was 87.
Ellen Marson, a close friend who disclosed the death to the Times, said the cause was voluntary assisted suicide at Pegasos in Switzerland: "Betty recently told a few close friends she was going to do this. True to form, she was resolute in her decision; Betty made it clear she did not want to hear our objections to her plan.... She felt she didn't have much more to contribute."
Rollin belonged to Compassion & Choices, an advocacy group that supports expanding access to end-of-life medicine, and had been a board member of the Death with Dignity National Center for nearly 20 years.
Rollin attended Sarah Lawrence College, where she focused on acting. After graduating in 1957, she studied acting with Sanford Meisner and Lee Strasberg, along with working in regional theatrical productions.
She also wrote the first two of her seven books, I Thee Wed (1961) and Mothers Are Funnier Than Children (1964), the latter of which was published soon after she was hired as an editor and writer at Vogue magazine. She joined Look magazine as a senior editor and writer in 1966 and stayed until it folded in 1971. Rollin then went to work for NBC News in the early 1970s and stayed until 1982, when she left for a two-year stint as a correspondent for the ABC News program Nightline.
In First, You Cry (1976), Rollin wrote candidly about her delayed cancer diagnosis, her mastectomy, a divorce and the love affair that followed it, and her acceptance that her life did not end with the loss of a breast. The book was adapted into a CBS television movie in 1978, starring Mary Tyler Moore.
Her mother had ovarian cancer and died in 1983, an episode recounted in Rollin's bestselling book Last Wish (1985). When her mother said she was ready to die, Rollin and her husband "found a sympathetic doctor who suggested that her mother take a combination of drugs that would lead to death," the Times wrote, adding that Rollin "had ignored her lawyer's advice not to tell the story. 'I figured it was worth it,' she said in an interview last year with the Kunhardt Film Foundation, adding, 'I mean, I certainly didn't want to go to prison.' "
Last Wish was also turned into a TV movie, on ABC in 1992, with Patty Duke portraying Rollin and Maureen Stapleton as her mother.
Rollin told the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1976 that she felt she had no choice but to be as open as possible when she was writing about her breast cancer: "I do not enjoy the fact that everyone who's read my book knows everything intimate in my life. But I think it's important for people to tell the truth. It makes you feel better to get it out, and I think it makes other people feel better, too."